Your story as a forum admin

I need to know how did you manage to grow your forum and how did you made the members post so your forum would grow. Please tell me personal stories because I'm keen on learning from your experience. I don't want quick tips as I can always find a bunch of them on the internet.

Thank you.

 

like any other websites its like raising a baby. you take care of it everyday make it grow.

for forums IMO best approach is working constantly to feed in good content, keeping it clean, work on marketing.

first two years for any forum is critical. slacking means death of forum pretty much.

 

The most important thing is to make your forum appealing to outsiders and not cliquish; forums by their nature are pretty cliquish, especially the older they are, but they need to be welcoming to new members to a large extent.

 

Everyone keeps trying to emulate the big dogs, and they already have the market. You will have a higher
change of success by finding a market that may not be already out, or find a much smaller niche with less
competition, and like the above poster has stated, be prepared to baby your forum for the next 2-4
years, and if you can not commit to that, then do not step up...this is why most forums fail.

 

You need to be constantly adding content to your forum. That's probably the most important thing to do in regards to maintaining an active forum.

 

Dscurlock has the right idea. You should start a forum within a more specialised niche and later on, expand outwards once you have enough size to support it. If you look at how companies grow, this is also what they do. Microsoft, Apple, etc. started out selling basically only one thing.

 

Certainly go with a niche. Enforce strict standards on the posters (grammar) and try get experts in the niche you're in to post and hang around on the forum, get them to pimp it a bit too.

 

Did you read what the thread is about or are you just posting in any thread you can, posting garbage, to increase your post count?

 

first year is adding interesting content to forum. not much users so nothing to manage really
on second year loads of users but not that much posting. So promoting user to post
lets see what happen next year

 

I guess you can have all the content you want...its is known fact that members are not drawn
to forums that appear to be very new, or low on post counts. I had one signup today...
he did nothing ...he did not post, he just signed up and logged off...I try to post and
post articles and often as i can, but to be honest; I am only one person....
I am glad this is just a hobby

 

Forums are just like any other website - you have to post new threads, promote it, and go from there. Without content, your forum won't succeed, and without promotion, nobody will find your forum. Have you read the article on successfully planning a website/forum?

 

This is probably the best advice in this thread.

Countless people seem to opt for niches that are already well over there saturation point. Webmasters forums, General Gaming, General Music etc. What is your forum going to offer that none of the existing, established forums in that niche do? If the answer is "I don't know", then don't even bother, you're destined to fail.

Think about your interests, then start to research sub-niches based on that. Generally speaking, you will find much more success if you target a smaller, more targeted market - with less competition.

 

according to my experience, you have to hire or gather some people to talk about topics when starting, as you know people like to participate forums where there are lot of people and lot of discussions, so you have to make it. You have to choose a good niche for your forum too.

 

It's great advice asking experts in your area to post on your forum, but enforcing spelling and grammar I feel is a little extreme, almost dictatorial?